Mike Olson [06.14.07 10:27 AM]

Tim (or Phil),

Can you post a link to the site where I can download the PDFs weekly? I'm a subscriber to the paper copy but didn't know that the PDFs were regularly posted as well. Looked around makezine.com to no avail, and a visit to cachefly.oreilly.com suggests there must be some other path to them.

I've got a Sony PRS500 e-ink reader. Any chance that the PDFs are formatted for that device? I know you guys have some around the Make offices.

  pt [06.14.07 10:40 AM]

hi mike-

they're all on the blog each week as well as here:
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/make_pdf/

you can also click the itunes link on the /blog page . keep in mind these are not entire PDFs of the magazine, these are projects (but some are indeed from the magazine).

we do not format the PDFs for the sony reader (i have one too). but most display pretty nicely as is.

cheers,
pt

  Sandeep [06.14.07 11:56 AM]

Phil:

I just checked out Makezine and what a fabulous idea. Thanks to Tim for introducing me to what is like to become something I will use and write about.

Cheers!

  Tobi [06.14.07 03:44 PM]

Are there any quality issues? If the company that produced the software would sponsor O'Reilly's publication of a manual one might think that this manual is not really neutral but the author might start some kind of self-sponsorship by not critisizing the product adequately. Whenever I see booklets in magazines that are sponsored by a company that manufactures products that are talked about inside the booklet I don't trust the content (e.g. a booklet about DSL that was sponsored by Deutsche Telekom here in Germany)

  Tobi [06.14.07 03:47 PM]

Oh, and it really is great to hear that the Sony PDF is being shipped for free if orders exceed 29,95$ Do you reimburse me then for part of the traffic I took up from my flatrate? ;-)

  Peter Wayner [06.15.07 04:10 AM]

This is a fascinating idea and one that's worked a bit in the past. I think FedEx sponsored a number of short, serious books one year out of its marketing budget between 1989 and 1991. These didn't have much to do with FedEx, at least in an obvious way, and the publisher deliberately chose big thinkers like George Gilder and Arthur Schliesenger.

The biggest worry is that you're changing the relationship with your reader. A traditional book is sold to the reader and the author has only one allegiance: to the reader alone. A free, ad-supported author, on the other hand, must take care of the advertiser and that can be dangerous if the topic is too closely aligned with the advertiser's interests.

But the biggest question is why Sony or any other company would pay O'Reilly to put out a manual instead of doing it in house. You would need to offer better writing and editing, something that wouldn't be hard, but it would need to be significantly better to pay for the O'Reilly overhead. Companies can hire the same freelancers as O'Reilly.

You should also ask yourself how this might corrode the O'Reilly brand. I could see a corporation hiring your team to produce a missing manual in the hope of tapping into the hip web. It would be a simple way for them to purchase street credibility by getting mentions in your websites. And there would probably be unspoken pressure to support this business by including speaking gigs at your tradeshows. But soon your website would be filled with ideas that bought their way instead of ideas that filtered their way up through your network of writers and editors. Quality of ideas would suffer.

  Michael Jensen [06.15.07 09:26 AM]

There's also another "ad-supported" model, more along the lines of sponsorship, that is demonstrated in Wowio -- free PDF books with sponsorship ads inserted every few pages. It's not quite Adwords; originally they were aiming at demographic-driven targetting of ads, based on knowable aspects and interests of the downloader, but have since shifted to a sponsorship model. They split sponsorship revenue with the publisher; they're just a platform.


Requires sign-in to get PDFs, so there are some drawbacks in terms of passive search-based marketing, but it's a model that seems to be working. Self-promotion alert: I've got some puzzle books available on Wowio, but I'm more interested in the model than the revenue.

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